Basket kete

Basket made of light and dark brown flax strips plaited together in a geometric pattern, with handles made of twisted cord.

The Forster Register of 1799 listed only one New Zealand basket; single examples however had already been handed over to the Academische Museum in Göttingen before the acquisition of Georg Forster’s collection as assembled by Humphrey. An entry in a register prepared by Heyne read: ‘From Professor Forster in Cassel. 1. An unusually elaborately plaited basket from Toncatabu in the South Seas.’ This could however be one of the baskets handed over to Hanover. An unequivocal identification of which of the two pieces is involved, and which one originates from Forster’s legacy, can no longer be made. Markus Schindlbeck